Buildings destined for the wrecking ball usually become forgotten shells, but art gallery owner Mehdi Ben Cheikh saw the walls and stairwells of a 10-storey derelict apartment block in Paris as an opportunity - an enormous blank canvas, ready for a splash of colour.

Cheikh coordinated over 100 international street artists to descend upon the empty building armed with stencils and spray cans to decorate it inside and out.

Cheikh said of the 'Tour 13' project: "We've been allowed to use these towers before they are demolished, to bring them back to life, before they disappear. So I've brought artists from the four corners of the earth to work on this enormous exhibition.

"[However] I don't like the word exhibition, because it's something strange. It's not a museum or a gallery, but it's not a wasteland or squat either. It's a mixture of all those things.

"There are people from all over the world doing Street Art, but in their own way, within their own culture, with their own view of reality.

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"Although I am a gallery street art owner I also feel a duty to engage in urban practice [of art] … with the movement that is Street Art, just taking works and sticking them in a gallery, to sell them on, makes no sense. [Whereas] this project makes sense."